


lies breathed through silver

by urcadelimabean



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-09
Updated: 2018-06-09
Packaged: 2019-05-20 05:12:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14888273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/urcadelimabean/pseuds/urcadelimabean
Summary: Jack and Silver talk about the importance of a narrative -- does it matter if it's true or untrue?





	lies breathed through silver

The only noise: the whir of bugs around the lantern and the sound of shovels digging into the dark earth.

"This will be a moment people tell stories about," Jack began, glancing at Silver. "This cache of gems, the war stemming from it...this turning point, of a sort."

Silver stilled and rested his forearms on the end of his shovel. He breathed out, and said after a while, "I find that I don't much care."

"No?" Jack asked, suddenly curious. "Long John Silver...what tales have been spun about you." He paused, waiting for Silver to fill in the silence--Silver just looked away into the warm night. "Whether true or untrue, there is a narrative that will take shape out of this."

With surprising vehemence, Silver interjected, "No narrative could make sense of this, this...list of unending horrors."

Neither of them were digging anymore. The hole was certainly deep enough for the cache of gems and as well as a score of bodies of the men who had already given their lives to defend it.

"What a strange thing for a man to say in whose name this war is to be fought."

Silver shook his head, disagreeing with something Jack had said but apparently unwilling to specify it.

"Where were you born, Mr. Silver?"

A short silence. "Whitechapel, the east end. As an orphan I was sent to a home for boys in Devonshire."

The forest was still about them. In the distance, the crashing of waves.

"It's funny," Jack began dryly after a moment, "I was speaking with one of your crew earlier, a man by the name of Howard. Tell me, what are the chances your life stories are such perfect mirror images of each other?"

Silver smiled humorlessly, without it reaching his eyes, which stared back at Jack coldly.

"And tell me," Jack pressed harder, "why do I get the sense that you can't tell the truth to even your captain, that you fed him the same lie you just fed to me? Closer to him than any man in the world, and yet there is still such a gulf between you.”

Silver took a quick step towards him on his crutch. "I'd watch my words if I were you.”

Jack exhaled slowly. “You don't frighten me.”

“No? Maybe I should.”

"Perhaps the world is full of unending horrors," Jack continued. "A story is true, a story is untrue. Perhaps the only stories that will make sense are the ones that happen in the dark between two people, two partners, whether lovers or something else entirely, where some sort of private truth can be found, protected from those outside."

"No two people are so close that nothing can come between them, not me and my partners, nor you and yours.”

"No...and yet we strive for that closeness all the same. Perhaps so that the narrative of our lives begins to make sense at last."

Anne had certainly never cared to make sense of the her life in the grand scheme of things. Truth for her lay in the space slowly discovered in intimate touches with Max, one of many precious things now lost, contained in the chest they would shortly bury in the ground.

Silver breathed out a laugh, and smiled slowly. "Perhaps." He stuck his shovel back in the dirt. "Then truth can be found in the darkness, but the more men add their voices to the narrative the more distorted it becomes. Myths are lies, though breathed through silver."

"No," Jack murmured, smiling to himself as he looked out in the direction of the sea, "they are not."

They waited on in silence. Once Flint arrived with the cache they could finally put it to rest in the ground. Until then, with nothing but each other for company, they fell back into conversation.

“Suppose…” Silver began, “this war should end. This narrative, of which we have lost all control, cut short because of that very thing we spoke of--what happens in the space between two people.”

“And, just hypothetically of course, what would those people think of giving up their war?”

“If it was a choice between your partner's death and this war, which would you choose?”

Jack huffed a breath, fully aware that Silver had avoided answering. “That's not a difficult choice to make. I'd choose Anne without question. But, look…” he sighed. “A woman like Anne won't ever be welcome in civilization and she will take no pardon. If there was no place left for us where we could survive without having to mutilate ourselves to fit into the roles society wanted for us, I would have killed her altogether in another way.”

“Is it really worse to lose an identity than to lose a life?”

“In some cases, I'm afraid yes.”

Jack thought back to his first voyage as a captain, and the turmoil Anne had gone through when her place on his ship was no longer a certainty, her entire life cut loose like a sail blown away in a gust of wind when she had been certain it was secure. She had rashly killed two people knowing the retribution might cost her life.

“I've seen my fair share of death,” Silver said, “and lost my fair share of dreams. I'd rather live with regret than die with conviction.”

Charles would no doubt say that Silver had it exactly backwards. Jack chuckled, but didn't find he much liked either option. “Suppose this war were to end...would your partners be able to make sense of the narrative of their lives without it?”

Silver glanced away, at a loss for words for a moment. “True, untrue, war, no war…. maybe it isn't so binary as that after all. A way to…put the world in balance. Address the grievances we hold against England without damning ourselves to die in the process.” He shook his head. “But if it exists, I cannot yet see it.”

The disturbance of leaves alerted them to Flint's arrival with the cache.

“I’ll leave the two of you,” Jack murmured. He watched them for a moment, illuminated by the fire, two myths--but in the darkness simply two men.

As time extended, their personal convictions and motives would matter less and less, perhaps, but they would still be there, underlying in the shadows, whether history remembered them or not. Jack wondered what shadows stood behind Flint and drove him onwards.

**Author's Note:**

> part of the dialogue based on quotes from C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien:  
> Lewis: Myths are lies, even though lies breathed through silver.  
> Tolkien: No, they are not.


End file.
